The Year of Facebook: U.S. Traffic Has Grown by 55% in the Last Year [STATS]

Watch out, Google: U.S. traffic to Facebook has risen by a whopping 55% in the last year, according to data sent to us by comScore.

In October 2009, Facebook () had 97.37 million unique U.S. visitors. In October 2010 though, the world’s largest network garnered a whopping 151.13 million U.S. uniques. That’s a growth rate of 55.2% year-over-year.

Let’s think about just how far Facebook has come in the course of a year. October 2009 was the height of the Facebook vs. Twitter war, where the former began to emulate the latter’s features in an effort to grind Twitter () into dust (remember Facebook Lite?). And while Facebook’s 300 million users and 97.37 million monthly U.S. visitors were impressive, it still didn’t beat YouTube ()’s 100.69 million U.S. uniques.

Today Facebook has over 500 million members and is the second most-visited website in the world, trailing only Google () and its 173.3 million U.S. uniques. It has annihilated MySpace and outpaced Twitter’s growth (30% year-over-year). Facebook is no longer concerned with Twitter and has instead set its sights on battling Google. And none of these stats account for Facebook’s massively popular mobile apps.

2010 will go down as the year of Facebook, and for very good reason. Open Graph and Instant Personalization has cemented the company’s role as the web’s most important platform, and a series of highprofileproductreleases have turned it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Can Facebook keep it up in 2011, though? Or will another company emerge as the new darling of the web? Let us know what you think.